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HOT TOPICS
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 1)
Chris had significant domain knowledge in the hedge fund industry. He has self-financed a successful company offering to secure virtualization services to the segment with high service levels. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Chris
Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: Tell me how you got there. Vince Steckler: It’s basically a few things. When the company went into France, we started at the community side. The competition in France at that time had English language products, which doesn’t really go very real well in France. So we built a French language product. Since
Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 4)
Vince Steckler: It was very intriguing because it was a very engineering-oriented company. Of the 40 people, there was one person in Finance, one person in Marketing and Sales, and 38 engineers. They weren’t doing very good business because there wasn’t anyone paying attention to it. I actually joined there taking what people would probably consider
Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: How much were they doing at that point? Vince Steckler: In 2008, they did about $18 million in revenue. Sramana Mitra: This was all self-financed? Vince Steckler: Yes. The company had actually never taken any investment into its treasury. The company, by the way, is a Unicorn. We’re worth well over a billion
Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 1)
Vince has built a $300 million a year security software company out of Prague, with a global customer base. Fantastic story, a must read! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Vince Steckler: I’m originally from
Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal (Part 7)
Sramana Mitra: Have you bootstrapped your company all the way or have you raised money along the way? Taso Du Val: We raised a really small round for approximately $1.4 million with some really great individuals. It was a seed round, so it was not a priced round. We still consider ourselves a bootstrapped startup. Hence,
Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to Scale: Taso Du Val, CEO of Toptal (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: I’ll just benchmark it by saying oDesk, for instance, charges 10% of the contract value. Tell me what the additional value is that you’re adding to the process. Taso Du Val: We screen all of the individuals for you. Not only for our network but also for your specific request. There are many
Building an AI-Driven Sales Optimization Company: Vincent Yang, CEO of EverString (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting strategically in how you’ve navigated the story so far? How many customers do you have now? Vincent Yang: I think we have four or five dozen customers. The growth rate is actually pretty fast. Sramana Mitra: What’s the pricing model? What’s the business model? Vincent Yang: The core of